“Le Cinq” Office Tower / Neutelings Riedijk Architects

Neutelings Riedijk Architects has made a design for a 180 m high office tower, ‘Le Cinq’ in Paris, commissioned by Brussels developer Buelens NV as one out of four teams for the international competition organized by the City of Paris. The new skyscraper serves as the focal point for the east of Paris in the new urban development of the XIIIth arrondissement, near to the Grande Bibliothèque. The tower consists of a stacking of five separate volumes of six stories each, cantilevered from two vertical cores with open space between the volumes. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Each block has an open inner court and a vast roof garden. In this way, a new type of green urban skyscraper has been developed that combines the quality of a low-rise urban fabric with the potential of high-rise tower. The tower holds 110.000 m2 of above ground floor surface of office spaces, a 300 room hotel and a shopping center, as well as ten underground parking levels. The 180-meter high tower will be the first major high-rise building in Paris since the Montparnasse Tower and the Riverbank Towers in the 1970′s.

‘Le Cinq’, translated as ‘The Five”, invents a new typology for the round by successfully combining the advantages of high-rise building: Land Economy and Transport, prospects beautiful city, … pooling services, and the neighborhood, the city block, in which man finds a scale measured. The juxtaposition of neighborhoods that are traditionally sold to the horizontal, is done by simply, in a fragmented vertical. Form, provided that the function associated with this new typology defines a vertical city.

‘The Five’ consists of five islands, six autonomous floor, each organized around a central space that evokes a square or garden conducive to trade, to life. Each of these spaces develops an original theme, built from treatments or interventions artistic landscape, giving it a specific identity. The ambition of this new typology is to bring the concept of turn the more soul, the amenity is to enable the professor who will practice areas of the Tower “The Five” to find, regardless of height, a pleasant sensation of a scale measured and a place open to the outside.

‘The Five’ offers a combination of scales and fragments its slenderness, it is not a monolithic object that imposes its monumentality. The view south and north facades, by their alternating solids and voids, allows the eye to move between the building plan in the longer term, and in heaven to slip between the islets horizontal. “The Five” is not a tight screen. It is not treated as a solitary object, representing a completion: it aspires to be a link between Paris and its outskirts.

Placed so iconic in the extension of the Avenue de France and enjoying a Parisian facade on the device, the tower “THE FIVE” is emerging as one of the cornerstones of the future “skyline” in Paris. Its strategic location allows for building a new line with the Eiffel Tower compositionurbaine meet the historical axis of the Right Bank, the Louvre to the Grande Arche de La Defense, other iconic monuments of the Parisian imagination.

The project has the ambition to become a benchmark for sustainable development. The project involves the production of renewable energy on site including the use of the geothermal system and a solar heat pump, pre cooling of fresh air and use of gray water, meeting the climate plan of the City Paris. The shape of the tower, with its islands with 6 floors and patios to encourage stair use and allows the presence of openings for natural ventilation, reducing energy consumption while minimizing the impact of air flow in the foot building for pedestrians, creating a destination for the ballad and leisure. Architects: Neutelings Riedijk Architects Location: Paris, France Client: Buelens NV, Brussels Program Area: 130,000 m2 Costs: Euro 2500.000.000 Status: International invited competition 2012